If you want to teach this kind of reprehensible and purposefully ignorant bullshit to your children, do it in the comfort of your own home or church. Don’t spend scarce public dollars on it, the rest of us want fact-based education for our children, not Christian melodrama.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Republican party, root and branch, from its deepest grass roots to its highest levels, has become completely demented. This does not mean that it is incapable of winning elections; on the contrary, the 2010 midterms, as well as the statewide elections around the country, ushered in a class of politicians so thoroughly dedicated to turning nonsense into public policy that future historians are going to marvel at our ability to survive what we wrought upon ourselves.

The Democratic party has an obligation to beat the Republican party so badly, over and over again, that rationality once again becomes a quality to be desired. It must be done by persuading the country of this simple fact. It cannot be done by reasoning with the Republicans, because the next two generations of them are too far gone. The state legislators now passing all manner of crazy laws represent the next generation of national Republican leaders. They are proudly unknowing.

It took president Obama nearly three years to figure out what Pierce wrote in the second paragraph. His campaign strategy reflects these lessons learned. Now if only the rest of the party will come along with him, we might have something.

As local officials gear up for a national election where razor-thin margins could tip the balance of power, the federal agency established after the Florida ballot disaster of 2000 to ensure that every vote gets counted is leaderless and adrift.

President Barack Obama nominated two new Democratic commissioners last year, but congressional Republicans are trying to defund the agency entirely — which means for now no Republican nominations and no confirmation of the Democrats’ candidates.

“It is kind of disgraceful that we’re headed into a major election and the only federal agency that’s devoted to election administration has zero commissioners,” said Lawrence Norden, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

If you can’t win on ideas, I guess the next best thing is to keep your opposition away from the ballot box.

4. Here’s some awesome guidance on public speaking from the irrepressible ZeFrank.

It is safe to say, nearly four decades later, that most of the information-technology industry and much of global commerce still depend on these 8.5 inventions.

Technology companies and many others in downstream industries have collectively realized trillions of dollars in revenues and tens of trillions in market value because of them. It’s true—and here’s where conventional wisdom constantly chimes in—that Xerox realized very little of these trillions. But consider this: The budget for the parts of Xerox PARC that focused on computing in 1974 was less than $3 million. Those 8.5 inventions cost about $10 million in total—about $43 million in today’s dollars.

Now compare that total investment against the return of just one of those inventions—laser printing—which Xerox did extensively commercialize. Let’s say, to be conservative, that Xerox generated $100 billion from laser printing over the ensuing years. That would mean Xerox PARC paid for itself more than two thousand times over. That’s not a bad return on investment.

In the upper echelons of enterprise technology, acquisitions have largely replaced innovation as the model for growth. It suits shareholders better as they are leery of large scale investments into ideas that may never produce fruit on the balance sheet. However, it might be time for a return to the glorious days of reckless corporate innovation.